Jennie

One


{From Recollecting a Life by Hugo Archibald, PH.D., D.Sc., F.R.S., published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 1989 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used with permission}

The Cameroons, April 15, 1965



I will not soon forget the day the two Makere men brought the chimpanzee into camp. The animal was slung over one man's shoulder and a thin rivulet of blood trickled down the shining hollow of the man's back, black blood glistening against black skin. I watched him through me half-open flap of the tent. He stopped in the clearing in front of the tent and slid his burden sideways on to the hardpacked dirt, where it lay with arms crossed. His friend stood next to him. Both their feet and legs were white with dust to the knees. The man straightened up and clapped his hands twice, sharply, to announce their arrival. I waited. The men knew I was in the tent, but to show myself too quickly would make negotiations over the price more difficult. I soon heard Kwele shouting at the visitors in Pidgin, the lingua franca of the Cameroons.



"Whah you done bring, hunter man? Na bad beef dis!”



Kwele was a fine negotiator. We had worked out an excellent system of softening up the seller.



"Masa no want dis beef! Masa done get angry too much. Go away!"



All this was part of the routine, and Kwele relished his role a great deal, perhaps a little too much. Naturally, I was excited by the prospect of acquiring the skull of a female chimpanzee. A small group of camp assistants had dropped their work and converged on the scene, with that look of boredom mixed with the faint hope that something unexpectedly unpleasant might happen. The two men stood behind the animal, stubborn and silent.



I moved aside the flap of my tent, without getting out of my chair. The shouting stopped and Kwele stood there grinning, holding a shovel.



"Eh!" he said. "Dese hunter man got um beef. Masa no want dis beef?"



I smiled and clapped my hands softly, as etiquette required. "Iseeya, hunter man," I said.



"I see ya, sah," they said in unison. They were thin, with a delicate tracery of tattoos on their abdomens and around their nipples. One carried a tiny crossbow with a fascicle of darts.



"Thank you, Kwele," I said. Kwele grinned again, then scowled at the men.



The men shuffled their feet in the dust.



The animal was a female Pan troglodytes, a lowland chimpanzee, and she was very pregnant.



"You kill this beef with poison arrow?" I asked the two men.



One of the men stepped forward. "He go for stick, sah, shoot um with arrow." He held up the crossbow for me to inspect. ("Stick" is the Pidgin word for tree.)



I knelt by the animal and looked at her face. The eyes, which were half open, suddenly widened. It gave me quite a fright; the bite of a chimpanzee can break one's arm.



"Whah! Na alive, dis beef!" shouted Kwele accusingly, delighted to find one more thing wrong with the specimen. "Mebbe 'ee go hurt Masa! Den you go pay!"



"Poison be working," said one of the men placidly. "Ee go die one time." Then he added, firmly: "Masa gone pay twenty-five shillings."



"Na whatee!" cried Kwele. "Masa no go pay twenty-five shillings. Mebbe 'ee no go die attall!"



" 'Ee go die one time," the man repeated stolidly. He knew the efficacy of his poison, and so did I.



The dying animal stared at me with round dark eyes, and a gurgle sound issued from her throat. Her mouth opened, exposing a row of worn, heavily caried incisors. The hairs around her muzzle were gray, and one ear was in tatters, torn and healed long ago. She was old, and I remember thinking, Better to die old after a full life. And, of course, they would have killed her for food anyway.



"Go get my pistol,' I said. Kwele ducked into the tent and came back with the holster carrying my Ruger .22 magnum. I checked the barrel to make sure it was loaded and leveled the gun at the animal's heart. A shot to the head would have destroyed the thing I needed for my taxonomic studies: the skull.



Then a movement began to take place, a quick even movement of the animal's body. I backed up, thinking she might be reviving. But then I realized something far different was going on. The animal was aborting her fetus.



"Roll her on her back," I shouted.



There was a sudden sharp murmur from the crowd; this was turning out to be far more interesting than yet another bargaining session for a dead specimen. The female chimpanzee began to shudder, and a whitish head, slick with thin black hairs, appeared. In a second it was over. The fetus lay on its side in the dust, and the afterbirth was sliding out. The mother's eyes were still open, looking.